Immigration reduction in the United States

Immigration reduction refers to a social movement in the United States that advocates a reduction in the amount of immigration allowed into the country. Steps advocated for reducing the numbers of immigrants include advocating stronger action to prevent illegal entry and illegal immigration, and reductions in non-immigrant temporary work visas (such as H-1B, L-1 and J-1). Some advocate tightening the requirements for legal immigration requirements to reduce numbers, or move the proportions of legal immigrants away from those on family reunification programs to skills-based criteria. What separates it from standard immigration reform is that reductionists see immigration as a major source of social, economic, and environmental problems, and seek to curtail current immigration levels.

Many immigration reformists only oppose illegal immigration and support continued legal immigration methods. Some immigration reductionists want to maintain current legal immigration percentages until fewer adverse effects are created by legal immigration.

The related terminology "self-deportation" or "to self-deport" refers to the viewpoint that through social policy illegal immigration to the U.S. can be reduced by causing residents to leave the U.S. on their own, thus creating a reduction.

In 2016, Donald Trump ran for president as a Republican. His campaign featured rhetoric and policy proposals that were strongly anti-immigrant. His proposals found broad support in the U.S. heartland and the Southern United States, although they were criticized by Democrats and some Republicans as racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. Trump won the election and enacted multiple anti-immigrant policies as president.

Nativism

There have been several discernible groups at various times within the United States, which pushed for immigration restrictions, with separate concerns, origins, and aims; thus there are several antecedents for the modern immigration reduction movement. These include the nativist United States American Party, often called the Know Nothing movement of the mid-19th century, which objected to increased Catholic immigration of predominantly Irish and German origin; the Workingman's Party which objected to immigration laborers from China to California during the late-19th century, a sentiment that ultimately led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Immigration Restriction League, which objected to greatly increased immigration from southern and eastern Europe during the late-19th and early 20th centuries, and the joint congressional Dillingham Commission, which studied this latter complaint and proposed numerical restrictions. Eventually, following World War I, these studies led to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924.

Labor unions

Organized labor generally favored restrictions, especially from Asia.The National Labor Union (1866–1874) campaigned for immigration restrictions as well as the eight-hour workday, as did the American Federation of Labor under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. The AFL–CIO did not reverse its opposition to immigration until 1999. The early United States Socialist Party was split over the issue, with some Socialist leaders including Jack London and Congressman Victor Berger supporting immigration restrictions; the party as a whole never had consensus and officially opposed only the importation of strikebreakers.

Overpopulation

Concern over overpopulation was stimulated by Paul R. Ehrlich, who both founded Zero Population Growth and published ''The Population Bomb'' in 1968. The popular book foretold alarming disasters that would inevitably occur in the next decades. Though some of his predictions did not come to pass, many believe his main points are valid, and they succeeded in inspiring a movement. Environmentalists including David R. Brower and David Foreman took the threat seriously. The Zero Population Growth organization did not involve itself, for the most part, in U.S. immigration policy, and a subset of the overpopulation movement grew which believed that immigration needed to be reduced, arguing that immigration was driving most U.S. population growth. These activists founded organizations separate from ZPG which would specifically address immigration issues. Among the important early organizations was Negative Population Growth, founded in 1972 by Donald Mann.

FAIR

The leading inspiration for the modern movement is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Founded in 1979, it is the largest and best funded organization in the movement. Three years later, John Tanton formed US, Inc. as an incubator and funding source to help form other organizations. According to public tax records, US, Inc, FAIR, and other Tanton organizations have received large donations from the Pioneer Fund and from the foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife. Tanton created US English (an English-only advocacy group), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), ProEnglish (another English-only advocacy group), and The Social Contract Press. US, Inc and FAIR have provided funding and logistical support to other organizations, including American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR), Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), and the recent Protect Arizona Now (PAN) initiative, Proposition 200.

The movement seemed to be triumphant in 1994 when California voters passed Proposition 187, an initiative that limited benefits to illegal aliens that had been authored and promoted by CCIR. However, one federal judge enjoined implementation of parts of the law as unconstitutional, and Democratic governor Gray Davis refused to pursue an appeal of the lower court decision, abandoning Proposition 187. Residual resentment over the racially divisive campaigns on both sides of the issue made immigration a topic that politicians largely avoided dealing with. A notable exception has been Tom Tancredo, who was elected to Congress from Littleton, Colorado in 1994. Together with Patrick Buchanan and the Tanton network, Tancredo has emerged as the most conspicuous voice advocating immigration reduction in Congress.

The Alliance for Stabilizing America's Population

The immigration reduction movement was partly revived by The Alliance for Stabilizing America's Population coalition. In 1997 members from a range of immigration reduction and environmental organizations met to rededicate themselves to the effort of population stabilization. Organized by Population-Environment Balance, it included such diverse groups as:
* Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND)
*California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR)
*California Wildlife Defenders (CWD)
*Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS)
*Carrying Capacity Network (CCN)
Another effort was the coalition formed under the name U.S. Sustainable Population Policy Project (USS3P) in 1996 by Douglas La Follette and David Pimentel. The USS3P membership contained many immigration reductionists of the time. In 1999 it sought cosponsors for a major national conference on immigration. A number of major individuals and minor organizations joined as co-sponsors, but no large national groups joined and it folded in 2000 without holding the intended conference.

The Internet offered new opportunities for communication by immigration reductionists, as it has with countless other movements. Peter Brimelow founded his VDARE writers collective in 1999. The year 1999 also saw the founding by Craig Nelson of ProjectUSA in New York City, which used billboards to advertise Census Bureau and other statistics about immigration in a campaign dubbed "Billboard Democracy," and publishes an ezine in which the term "Minuteman" was first used (2002) in connection with civilian border patrols. The NumbersUSA

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